Radio's Prince of Darkness Rules the Freeways

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 1988

LEISURE & ARTS

Radio's Prince of Darkness Rules the Freeways

By KATHLEEN A. HUGHES

Los Angeles

It's 7:30 p.m. and the freeway is bumper to bumper. Flipping the radio dial yields the usual mix of rock, Muzak and news. But then a soft, hypnotic male voice floats into the car. The voice is even and dreamlike. It sounds like a whisper directly into the ear:

"A dog will never be able to read Plato. A cat will never solve algebraic problems. Their intelligence binds them. It traps them. Why should we think we are any different? There are truths of which we shall remain unaware forever because we don't have the intelligence to grasp them. We are condemned to live in darkness…"

The voice, which continues along these lines for almost an hour, is that of Joe Frank, a radio personality who rapidly has become a cult figure in this sprawling city of freeways. The monologues and dramas on his program sound like a blend of philosophy texts, soap operas and Garrison Keillor. The shows are alternately dark, bizarre and very funny - but always hard to turn off.

In "Rent a Family," a single woman with two children talks about her loneliness and her decision to rent her family to a publishing executive. In another monologue, a man tells of being seduced by a woman who has only pretended to be deaf. Some of Mr. Frank's sagas give the impression that the radio accidentally has tuned into someone's phone line; the conversation seems far too intimate or bizarre to be on the air.

Other freeway riders, it turns out, also find the sagas disturbing. "This is incredibly depressing." says one friend who nevertheless insists on remaining in a parked car 20 minutes to listen to the end of a one-hour episode of "Rent a Family." A hospital administrator says, "They're so weird I turn them off. They remind me of the scary stories that used to be on the radio before television."

The man behind the stories lives in a small house in Santa Monica and operates out of the nearby basement studio of KCRW. a public radio station; his shows are broadcast in 13 other major cities including San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Minneapolis. A ruggedly handsome man of 48, he answers the door wearIng sweat pants and a T-shirt. Over cranberry juice in an austerely furnished living room, he explains how he wound up telling such peculiar tales on the radio.

"My life has been dark,"' says Mr. Frank, who explains that his family fled Nazi Germany and his father died when he was still a child. The family shoe business in New York went bankrupt. Other traumas included having to wear leg braces following an operation to correct clubfeet.

After working as a teacher of literature and philosophy at a Manhattan private high school, he got into radio more than a decade ago by hosting a late-night talk show on WBAI, a New York public radio station. "I talked a lot about relationships and obsessions of mine which had to do with death, alienation and ambivalence," he recalls matter of factly. He also freelanced as a radio writer and producer before joining KCRW two years ago.

All this gave him practice at making his voice hypnotic. "Before I went into radio I remember not liking my voice," he says. "I learned that the closer you are to the microphone the more Intimate it Is."

To gather material, Mr. Frank says he often pays people he meets socially to tell him true stories from their lives. He asked an actress if she ever had been Involved with someone she now despised. She had. So he told her to "imagine he's on the phone and go over the relationship."

In the resulting tape, entitled "Thank You, You're Beautiful," the woman berates her former lover for being shallow, selfish and vain. "You deserve everything that's coming to you and you're going to get it. Certainly from me," she says. It's like overhearing a woman breaking up with her boyfriend while you're waiting to use a pay phone. It's not Tennessee Wllliams - but it's hard not to listen.

The woman's monologue is interrupted at various points by Mr. Frank saying, "Thank you, you're beautiful, " a phrase that is followed by the sound of a crowd cheering. Mr. Frank also interjects absurdist phrases such as, "I'm sitting in a café in Paris, revolted by the roots of a chestnut tree," a reference to the novel "Nausea" by the late French author Jean-Paul Sartre.

Much of the time, Mr. Frank says, people's real-life stories aren't very interesting; the idea for "Rent a Family" came' from his own musings. Mr. Frank, who is single, says he found himself thinking, "Wouldn't it be great if I could have a family for a short period of time, then get out of it - and then bring it back?"

The saga begins with a monologue by a character named Eleanor, an out-of-work divorcee who notices an advertisement for a rent-a-family service. Her voice sounds pained and serious as she tells of going to the agency, filling out a 10-page application form and making a videotape with her two daughters for prospective renters. The next day the family has a taker, a publishing executive.

But as the saga continues, "Rent a Family" becomes like a soap opera for the insane. A date at the beach ends in disaster when the renter disappears with her two children. Subsequently Eleanor obsessively calls her ex-husband, Arthur, and his new wife, Kathy. and cries on the phone to them about her lonellness - despite their pleas that she stop calling. Each pathetic conversation Is preceded by the eerie sound of a long-distance phone number being dialed. At one point Eleanor begs Arthur and Kathy to let her become their housekeeper.

"He's gone too far with this one," says my traveling companion. At times, "Rent a Family" sounds all too real. But it's too much sobbing and desperation for the airwaves. Listening to it In the car Is like being stuck in a psychiatric ward with garrulous roommates.

Some of Mr. Frank's shows are lighter. For one live broadcast, he called three of his former girlfriends in New York in the middle of the night. After telling them they were on live radio, he asked them to sing along to the tune of "I Remember You." Only one didn't. And in a spoof of a radio talk show, Mr. Frank congratulates a piano player from the "Fast Piano Players League" for playing a piece of classical music In 58 seconds flat.

Even some of the darkest stories turn out to have amusing twists. In "Emergency Room," Mr. Frank uses tapes made in a Baltimore hospital emergency room that include cries of pain. Cut to the sound of waves, with Mr. Frank talking about how wonderful It Is to be alone In a beach house In Kurosawa, Japan.

"You drum your fingers on the bureau top and then you draw out the revolver and gaze at it. You put the barrel Into your mouth, close your lips on it - and take a bite. The chocolate breaks off and melts on your tongue. The Swiss guns are better than the Dutch… But you know you shouldn't eat them. You're a diabetic. If you go on this way you'll kill yourself."

Many of the sketches involve ruminations on loneliness, a state Mr. Frank finds conducive to working. "When I'm involved with someone, things become muddied," he explains. "There's a lot of static. I don't function and my energies are dissipated. Another person is a disturbance." But he insists his stories aren't depressing. "Most of what you hear on the radio Is banal, trivial and doesn't cut deeply," says Mr. Frank. "When you confront the nightmare you transcend it.